An excursion into certain areas of art, computers, philosophy, text, zombies, alchemy, metallurgy, music, food, creativity, pataphysics, politics, France where I worked as a cultural civil servant (yes, I do know that this is appalling), Berlin where I live and work for me, England where I come from, and so on... this may change.

Sunday, October 06, 2013

We - the Pataphysical plural - have been invited to present a paper at the international conference Renew: Media Art Histories, in Riga, the capital of Latvia, this coming week. Here's an abstract of the intervention and a participant in the Riga Zombie Walk. Of course this is part of the general misconception of Zombies as Hollywoodian brain-eaters, but we shall try to educate the masses there that Zombie can be much, much more than this - and far more terrifying in its intellectual implications.

We are the first generation to become less literate by reading, less
seeing by looking, less listening by hearing, less communicating by
talking, less social by using social media and less revolutionary by
making art. Thomas Kuhn’s argument that science proceeds with periods of
dominant normality interrupted by paradigm shifts, was important and
useful. I use the title ‘Anti-Kuhn’ only in the sense that an antithesis
is ‘against’ a thesis. Computer-based art, however, knows no
‘normality’. Every moment is revolutionary, every paradigm is up for
grabs. There is no time for the development of a critical discourse, nor
to examine the flux properly. When revolution becomes ‘normal’, a
transgression occurs. You can’t tell the difference between progress and
stasis. Art enters a ‘Zombie’ state, both dead and alive, true and
false, one and zero. It becomes undecidable. How do you think and write
about, curate and make, art that is undecidable? It is proposed in this
comedic, interactive and hopefully revolutionary paper that Post-Media
art should be independent of outdating technologies and electricity
supplies. What counts in art – surely? – are the ideas, which don’t care
about their medium of support or transmission. Ideas are not time based
but can be structured in an ‘all-at-once’ way. Then criticism of and
discourse about such art must occur in an all-at-once way, with no past,
present or even future. We need an art that makes us – viewer,
participant, critic, artist – do homework instead of networking. But
how? Pataphysics is the absurdist ‘science’ of the impossible, the
exception, of imaginary solutions to non-existent problems. I propose to
use certain ideas from that discipline to establish the possibility of a
new approach to Post Media art, one needing no media at all,
Post-Modem, Post-Everything.